850 nm vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers are the core light source of the short-range optical interconnect. With the increasing demands for data center traffic, achieving NRZ modulated high speed error-free transmission is a hot current research topic. This paper designed and fabricated a high-speed 850 nm vertical cavity surface-emitting laser with six oxide limiting layers in a λ/2 short cavity. At the room temperature, the -3 dB bandwidth was up to 23.8 GHz. Clear eye diagrams were obtained under the test conditions of 50 Gbit/s (1 m) and 40 Gbit/s (100 m). Transmission tests showed that error-free transmission was achieved at transmission distances of 1 m and 100 m and transmission rates of 40 Gbit/s and 30 Gbit/s, respectively, by NRZ modulation without the use of pre-emphasis, equalization, and forward error correction.